Continuing to look at other areas of the business that we need to review in advance of starting a rent-to-rent fleet, our IT systems and current computer system software are critical to this process. As you saw earlier when we looked at processes from taking rental orders to managing our documentation and our workflow, our system needs to support this stuff. So as I mentioned earlier on, not all dealer software programs are real good at handling rental fleets. And so I would suggest you sitting down with your software vendor and describing them what you want to do and let them walk you through the process to see how equipped the software actually is or not towards supporting your rent-to-rent fleet. Some of the critical things are the master records. In other words, what kind of information can you put on a master record? Because you need to be able to put class and subclass designations. For instance, a class may be wheel loaders and a subclass may be different size wheel loaders. You need to be able to have rental rates by classes of equipment as well as individual units because you may have one machine that's configured differently than all the other ones that are in that particular group. When we get down to looking at reports and earned income, repair, maintenance costs, this is very critical that you have this information. You might think of this almost like a mutual fund. And if you happen to have an investment company that you had a retirement account in and they sent you a statement at the end of the month and it just said you made 7% or you made 4%, if you were hoping for 7% and you got 2%, you're going to want to see the detail behind that as to what were the winners and what were the losers. And the same analogy can be made for your rental fleet. We need to be able to not only see totals, but we need to be able to see details of which categories of equipment were really making us money and which ones were not, which categories of equipment were really busy, which ones were not, which categories of equipment really had a lot of high maintenance and repair costs and which ones did not. And so the reporting process is really critical for you to be able to make good choices in growing your rental fleet and making money. We already talked about this, the processes. So you should have a pretty good idea at this point what kind of processes need to be in place and you need to have some type of workflow map and then you need to be able to put job descriptions and what happens at each of those stages in the process so that we have a plan of what our processes are going to be like and that needs to line up with our computer system and then later we're going to train people in each of those types of tasks. We also need to understand where quality control is going to come from. So generally, in business, quality control needs to be done by somebody that is not doing the work because it's real easy for people to get so far into the weeds that they make a mistake and they can't see it themselves. So one of the ways to get out in the marketplace and be considered competitive is we need to have good quality control. So you need to make that part of your process. How are we going to do this and not make a bunch of rookie mistakes? We talked about the facility review. This is something that should happen very early into your thinking about getting into rent-to-rent. You need to look about the office space. Do we have enough of it? Is it separated enough that we can focus on rental activity and not get caught up in the sales activity? Where's the rental fleet going to be parked? Somewhere on the property, hopefully, that we can see it. Where's the loading and unloading areas? We talked about staging areas, creating some service space that is not going to be for teardown and repair. It's going to be for servicing equipment, quick servicing equipment. We need to have an adequate wash area, and we need to be thinking about if you started with 30 machines or 50 machines and what happens if that fleet triples in the next two or three years, what are you going to do for space? Then we get into policies and documentation. We talked about qualifying rental customers. What is going to be our company policy for determining whether someone can rent from us or not? That takes a lot of time and energy to think that through. How are we going to qualify customers? Then transportation. Do we want to outsource that? Do we already have trucks and trailers of our own? What type of fee schedule are we going to put towards that? Are we going to have deposits on equipment, or are we only going to rent to people that have open accounts? Do we want to do business with non-account customers? What if they show up? How do we handle that? We need to come up with a rental rate strategy, and that gets into looking at the marketplace and determining what the competition is and also looking at our equipment and trying to figure out is this mostly going to rent by the week or the four-week? Then what's our billing cycle going to be? Are we going to do 30-day billing cycles, or are we going to do 28-day billing cycles? Are we going to bill in advance, or are we going to bill in arrears? Our rate structure, that's talking about how many days is equal to a week and how many weeks is equal to a month or a four-week, and are you going to prorate? So if somebody turns it in two days after a month rental period, are you going to prorate those two days, or is that going to fall back to a daily rate? Those are all decisions you have to make. In documentation, you're going to have to get a rental agreement drawn up, if you don't already have one, and the terms and conditions. The rent-to-rent business is a contract business, so everything that's in your contract and clearly stated is the terms and conditions of how you do business. If it's not written on that contract, I can tell you from personal experience going to the court, it's what's on that document and what you have offered and someone has received. That's a contract, and so I would suggest that you put the things that you know need to be in there, and I would highly recommend you have legal advice review the contract before you start using it. And then you have to figure out about a rental protection plan, which is formerly known as damage waiver. Is this a product that you're going to underwrite yourself, or are you going to purchase a product from some insurance company, and what type of rate are you going to charge for that? And I can tell you that the market is already very accustomed to paying for this type of product, and so by you just getting started in rental, you need to start with a rental protection plan immediately, and it has terms and conditions that you are the ones that decide what's covered and what's not covered. So documentation is a big deal, and it takes some time. And then lastly, as you start to get these things in place, then you're going to have to have employee training, and so you're going to have to go back to that human resources and look at what positions are we going to have. Are we going to have a rental coordinator, and what do they do all day? What's their responsibilities? What's a rental manager going to do all day? What is his responsibilities by the day, by the week, by the month? Product training. We can't assume that everyone knows how to actually operate all the machines. We can know something about specifications and sizes, but in the rental business, you may have a customer call you and say, I can't get this started, and you've got to visualize what machine that he's using and be able to walk him through the steps of how to crank that machine. We also have to have a strong understanding of the applications of the equipment. In other words, what we don't want to do is rent equipment into bad situations because it's really not designed to do that particular task. So we need to be considered advisors and experts to our customers, and therefore, we're going to have to have good application training for our products that we represent. Safety training goes without saying. We need to not only take care of our own employees about how we handle and operate equipment loading and unloading, but we also need to make sure that our customers are taken care of and that they operate and load and unload our equipment safely. Those are two areas of high liability in our industry if we don't have processes in place to make sure that our equipment has been inspected properly, we have operating instructions with it, and we have conveyed that to the customer, and that we even have internal training programs for our own employees.

IT systems

rent-to-rent fleet

rental orders

workflow

safety training